Ex­pand­ing eco­nom­ic and trade re­la­tions with the sec­ond largest econ­o­my in the world, Chi­na, must ul­ti­mate­ly be in the in­ter­est of T&T's find­ing mar­kets for its prod­ucts and es­tab­lish­ing ben­e­fi­cial part­ner­ships with large Chi­nese firms.Clos­er co-op­er­a­tion is po­ten­tial­ly more ben­e­fi­cial for this coun­try, as Chi­na has been claim­ing to be, and to some ex­tent shown it­self a coun­try that is in­ter­est­ed in giv­ing con­struc­tive as­sis­tance to de­vel­op­ing coun­tries.

In this re­gard, the Peo­ple's Re­pub­lic has in­vest­ed bil­lions of dol­lars in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca. Al­most need­less to say, such in­vest­ment has not been com­plete­ly al­tru­is­tic; the in­vest­ment has been di­rect­ed at en­er­gy re­sources in those host coun­tries where Chi­nese cap­i­tal and tech­nol­o­gy have gone. That is the na­ture of in­ter­na­tion­al re­la­tions.

In its quest to jump sev­er­al gen­er­a­tions in­to the mod­ern pro­duc­tive world, Chi­na has been court­ing coun­tries such as those in the Caribbean, T&T be­ing one of those most close­ly con­nect­ed with Chi­na.But hav­ing laid down that base for po­ten­tial ben­e­fits for T&T, there must be con­cern about the in­stant suc­cess that T&T's pro­posed pur­chase of long-range-pa­trol ves­sels is be­ing made out to be, es­pe­cial­ly by Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Gary Grif­fith.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers